Here is my newest argument against god.

Sally, the all-powerful, all-knowing, uncaused causer of the universe, is not exactly your run-of-the-mill God(dess). Rather, she is evil*, in the purest sense of the word. Now, when confronted with Sally - who seems to explain the existence of evil pretty well - counter with a surprising argument: The Problem of Good. How, they ask, in a world ruled by an evil God, is there such thing as good? Now, there are several possible responses. The first is the classic Free Will Defense. Simply: there is no fun in making dolls scream. It would be the equivalent of a human sadist simply listening to a soundtrack of screams (which is not a recording of any real event but is merely some people paid to scream). And eventually, playing with dolls gets boring. So we have free will: it is infinitely more satisfying to see punishment inflicted on a free, autonomous agent. Their screams are their own, not created by Sally simply pushing some metaphysical button on a flesh-puppet. Now, some might rejoin that this does not explain the occurrence of fortuitous natural occurences - sunny days, money found on the sidewalk, and so forth. There is another convincing response here, however: the presence of good makes the evil in the world all that much worse by contrast. Analogously, if one merely beats a child, the child won't be very happy - but think how much more unhappy the child would be if one took it from a life of happiness and love, and commenced to beat it. No-one misses a lollipop until they've had one. On the other hand, one might also respond that if we experienced evil all the time, we'd eventually get inured to the horror - our fortitude would increase and eventually there would be no injuring us. On the other hand, the presence of goodness softens our character, degrades it as it were, and so when suffering returns, we are more able to "appreciate" it. After having been soundly trounced on this front, some might ask why Sally even bothered to create the universe at all. But this is another silly objection. Being cruel to oneself isn't much fun. No, cruelty requires someone to be cruel to. Sally created this world specifically so that she could inflict pain upon us - something she would be entirely unable to do without such a world. So you see, the Problem of Good poses no significant problem for those of us unlucky enough to have experienced a personal revelation from Sally (believe me, be glad you haven't). *Depending on one's answer to the Euthyphro question this has different interpretations. If there are moral facts independent of God, Sally is simply aware of these facts and desires to do the exact opposite. If there are no moral facts apart from God, then it's not the case that Sally commands a certain thing and then acts contrary to it; rather she commands nothing and acts cruelly, for she is simply a cruel sort of God (as opposed to a loving one).

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/09/060915-oldest-galaxy.html

Just an interesting link I wanted to share about other big bangs happening in our solar system.

This morning there was a knock at my door. When I answered the door I found a well groomed, nicely dressed couple. The man spoke first:

John: "Hi! I'm John, and this is Mary."

Mary: "Hi! We're here to invite you to come kiss Hank's ass with us."

Me: "Pardon me?! What are you talking about? Who's Hank, and why would I want to kiss His ass?"

John: "If you kiss Hank's ass, He'll give you a million dollars; and if you don't, He'll kick the shit out of you."

Me: "What? Is this some sort of bizarre mob shake-down?"

I am realy not sure if this argument is logicaly valid but here is my 2 years old objection against onmiscience without using the rocky thingy.

Basically, we can show that absolute omniscience is impossible from set theory but I think we can go a lot further than this. A common theist modification is that to adopt a God that knows "everything that it is logically possible to know" - however - I believe that even this is impossible.

Justification:

There are two steps to my justification. The first assumes the set every truth that is logically possible to know, T, is finite. We then show that this can't be the case.

http://www.jesuscampthemovie.com/

Take a look at the video section. It made me cry.

WE'RE DOOOOMED!

HERMENEUTICS

"The science and methodology of interpretation, especially of scriptural text."

All interpretions are biased. This cannot be avoided. This is because in order to "interpret" you must work from a pre-existing concept that serves as the paradigm for the interpretation - i.e what you are going to make the book say. Your literally reworking it to fit into some pre-existing scheme.

Notice that in the case of religious dogma that this means that the reader must choose what is wrong, what is right, and what each passage means, indicating that the reader is in fact choosing what is moral. It is the reader who decides what is right, what is wrong, what is intended, what is moral, what is just, what is sin, what is fact, what is fiction.

I wrote some of this years ago. I'm going to edit it a bit and post it here... with one addition: while heresy is a religious concept, atheists could fall prey to thinking in terms of heresy too.... so let's all be on the lookout for this type of thinking when it creeps up in our own thoughts.

HERESY

Definition:

"The act of asking one's pastor or priest a question he can't answer."

Ok, officially, "heresy" is an opinion or a doctrine at variance with established religious beliefs, especially dissension from or denial of Roman Catholic dogma by a professed believer or baptized church member.

Hi. I've wandered over from the Infidel Guy site. (some of you might recognise me)
I'm an agnostic (as in, have no fixed opinion on God's 'existence' so I believe whatever I feel like) and always put myself in the 'neutral' position, arguing against any position I consider to be extreme. (be it a theistic one, an atheistic one... etc.)

So you could say my position is promoting true agnosticism when it comes to questions of God.
"My guess is as good as yours so let's neither of us claim to know better."
Obviously I have more argument with fundies than strong atheists as "you're irrational for disagreeing" is nowhere near as nasty as "you'll burn in hell for disagreeing!" and the former is probably right anyway!

Christians must steal their moral rules from secular morality. They have no choice, as the bible does not offer a moral system, it only offers a series of contradictory commands and a supposed threat of punishment in the "afterlife" for not following them - a punishment that is given equally to all violaters - whatever the sin.

In reality, christians realize that some actions are more moral than others. They realize that moral actions exist in a heirarchy, and that rape is far worse than stealing a pencil. Yet the bible holds that all 'sins' are equal, as all deserve the same punishment.

]In some debates with theists, I've seen theists try to run from the logical contradictions inherent in the negative characteristics of omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, by claiming that the christian god is NOT averred to be omnipotent, omniscient or omnibenevolent.

The problem with such ad hoc claims is that they are not biblical. Yet to deny what the bible says about the christian god would leave the christian without any basis for his claims at all. Hence, I wish to show here that the bible does assert that god is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, and therefore, the christian is basically trapped by the logical conundrum of an omnimax "god".